Be aware of superbugs: Newspaper coverage of NDM-1 in India, UK, and the USA

ABSTRACT

Marrying the psychometric paradigm with the community structure theory, this paper examines the coverage of a superbug (NDM-1) in newspapers in India, the UK, and the USA. It identifies several community structure characteristics: level of vested economic interest, level of health care available, and size of health care stakeholders as factors influencing how risks of NDM-1 are portrayed in terms of the level of dread, controllability, familiarity, and uncertainty. The finding provides baseline data for the scientific community and public health professionals in creating more effective messages to inform the public about the risks of superbugs.

KEYWORDS:

• Superbug
• psychometric paradigm
• community structure approach
• mass media
• newspapers

Notes on contributors

At the time of writing Bijie Bie was with the Department of Communication Studies, College of Communication and Information Sciences, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, USA. She is currently a Post Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Health Promotion, Education, and Behavior at the University of South Carolina. She conducts research on health communication.

Lu Tang is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies, College of Communication and Information Sciences at the University of Alabama. Her research focuses on culture and health communication.

Debbie Treise is a Professor of Advertising, and Senior Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and Research in the College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida. Debbie maintains an active research agenda that centers on health and science communications.

Notes

1. These countries were chosen due to the different development stages of NDM-1 in each country. NDM-1 was initially discovered in India, first reported by UK scientists, and has received plenty of attention in India and the UK, and is emerging in the USA. By September 2011, there were 143 NDM-1 cases in India, 88 cases in the UK (Health Protection Agency, 2011), and 13 cases in the USA (Hardy et al., 2012).

2. Fung et al. (2011) investigated an additional risk characteristic in their study of news coverage of avian flu: catastrophic potential. However, catastrophic potential as part of risk communication does not apply to the case of NDM-1, as the latter does not have a death toll that can be labeled as ‘catastrophic’. Thus, the risk dimension of catastrophic potential information could not be examined in this study.

3. This rate is measured in terms of DDS/1000 inhabitants/day. A standardized measure of antibiotic consumption is DDD (defined daily doses), which is recommended by the WHO Collaborating Centre for Drug Statistics Methodology (2009). DDD is defined as ‘the assumed average maintenance dose per day for a drug used for its main indication in adults’ (WHO Collaborating Centre for Drug Statistics Methodology, 2009, para. 2). A popular DDD index is DDDs per 1000 inhabitants per day, which can ‘provide a rough estimate of the proportion of the study population treated daily with a particular drug or group of drugs’ (The concept of the defined daily dose, para. 8). For example, when the antibiotic consumption in a certain population is 10 DDDs per 1000 inhabitants per day, this indicates that 1% of the population on average might receive antibiotics (The concept of the defined daily dose).

4. The loaded words we identified from this study included: Alarm, alarming, alert, danger, dangerous, deadly, deadliest, fatal, fear, frightening, horror, impossible to treat, kill, killer, lethal, life-threatening (life threatening), panic, scare, scary, serious, severe, threat, threatening, trouble, troublesome, unmanageable, unprecedented, unstoppable, untreatable, warn, warning, worry, worrying(ly), worrisome, worst.

5. The uncertain words we identified from this study included: Do not know, further studies seem necessary, impossible to say, ‘It has to be seen … ’, little data, need to be confirmed, no consensus on, no conclusions, no evidence, no records, not sure, there can't be any assumptions made, too early to judge, uncertain, uncertainty, unclear, unknown, unpredictable.